Tag: operation mockingbird

CIA’s Extraordinary Role Influencing Liberal Media Outlets Daily Kos, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone

In 1948, the year after its founding, the CIA created a top-secret program — Operation Mockingbird — to wield influence over the American media. From its inception, this clandestine project was yet another of the CIA’s outlaw enterprises.

The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act had illegalized the use of CIA funding to broadcast propaganda to Americans. When a congressional investigation in the mid-1970s first revealed Operation Mockingbird’s existence, shocked Americans learned that the agency’s key CIA collaborators included Washington Post owner Philip Graham; CBS owner William Paley; Time-Life publisher Henry Luce; top editors at the New York Times, and Joseph Alsop, whose influential column appeared in more than 300 newspapers.

CIA Director Allen Dulles oversaw Mockingbird’s illegal network until RFK Jr.’s uncle, President John Kennedy, fired him at the end of 1961. By then, Mockingbird was employing “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees… engaged in propaganda efforts.”

The agency commissioned its journalists to write articles promoting the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the national security state, and rewarded them with classified information to spice up their “scoops.”

The CIA also established formal journalism training for its spies, embedding them in key journals and nurturing their careers. The agency promoted propaganda narratives, including portraying murdered Salvadoran farmers as Communists under Soviet control, and discouraged newspapers from delving into CIA atrocities such as the agency’s mass murders of tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants, Buddhist leaders and intellectuals (Operation Phoenix); its orchestration of the butchering of a million Indonesian civilians; its political assassination, torture training and regime-change projects across Latin America (Operation Condor), Africa, and Asia; its crack dealing and drug smuggling operations; and its role in the overthrow of the Democratic governments in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq and elsewhere.

CIA-affiliated journalists were instrumental in suppressing questions about the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination — even as the agency’s former chief, Allen Dulles (who remarked with satisfaction of JFK’s murder: “That little Kennedy … He thought he was a god”), crafted and defended the official “lone shooter” narrative from his chair running the Warren Commission.

In November 1963, Life Magazine’s Executive Editor C.D. Jackson — a longtime CIA asset — purchased the original Zapruder film, published select frames upholding the lone-gunman theory, then locked the original in a vault to preserve it from public view.

Jackson also negotiated exclusive rights to Marina Oswald’s story and enlisted a CIA ghostwriter to fortify the official Warren Commission orthodoxy.Urgent: 3 Ways to Help Stop Biden’s Vaccine Mandates

The CIA coined the term “conspiracy theory” to discredit those who questioned the Warren Report. A Jan. 4, 1967, CIA document released under the Freedom of Information Act describes the agency’s strategizing how to combat critics of the Warren Report.

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New Owner of Politico Accepted Millions From the CIA to Print State Propaganda

The new owner of Politico, a mainstream media news outlet, has a lengthy track record of collusion with the Central Intelligence Agency to print stories considered favorable to the agency’s policy preferences.

Axel Springer SE is a German media conglomerate set to acquire Politico for a billion dollars by the end of October. The company, founded by and named after a German journalist who started his career writing for an antisemitic newspaper affiliated with the Nazi Party, accepted millions of dollars during the Cold War era to print editorial content at the behest of the CIA. Journalist Murray Waas has cited sources within the intelligence community who indicate Springer had accepted more than seven million dollars in the 1950’s to print CIA propaganda. Axel Springer’s relationship with the American CIA seems to have continued for several decades, with the corporation going so far as to train Afghan mujahideen armed and equipped by the CIA to film their encounters with Soviet forces.

An editor of Axel Springer’s flagship magazine Bild- fired this week for sexual misconduct with subordinate employees of the publication in the workplace- had accused journalist Glenn Greenwald and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden of enabling terrorism and cooperation with Al Qaeda.

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Inside Operation Mockingbird — The CIA’s Plan To Infiltrate The Media

“AStudent Group Concedes It Took Funds from C.I.A.”

That was the front page headline of the Feb. 14, 1967, edition of the New York Times. The article was one in a slew of articles published at the time in relation to something called Operation Mockingbird.

What was Operation Mockingbird?

It was an alleged large-scale project undertaken by the CIA beginning in the 1950s in which they recruited American journalists into a propaganda network. The recruited journalists were put on a payroll by the CIA and instructed to write fake stories that promoted the views of the intelligence agency. Student cultural organizations and magazines were allegedly funded as fronts for this operation.

Operation Mockingbird expanded later on in order to influence foreign media as well.

Frank Wisner, the director of the espionage and counter-intelligence branch, spearheaded the organization and was told to concentrate on “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”

Journalists were reportedly blackmailed and threatened into this network.

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So Much Of What The CIA Used To Do Covertly It Now Does Overtly

“If you go and Google, and I hope your viewers do, Operation Mockingbird, what you will find is that during the Cold War these agencies used to plot how to clandestinely manipulate the news media to disseminate propaganda to the American population,” Greenwald said. “They used to try to do it secretly. They don’t even do it secretly anymore. They don’t need Operation Mockingbird. They literally put John Brennan who works for NBC and James Clapper who works for CNN and tons of FBI agents right on the payroll of these news organizations. They now shape the news openly to manipulate and to deceive the American population.”

In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird. It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.

Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and the public is too brainwashed and gaslit to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits. The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor, and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.

They’re just rubbing it in our faces now. Like they’re showing off.

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How American Journalism Became A Mouthpiece Of The Deep State

Reporters joke that the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions, say, “No comment,” and head to happy hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information. They meanwhile profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.

Leon Panetta, once director of CIA, explained bluntly that the agency influenced foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.” The CIA has been running such ops to influence foreign elections continuously since the end of WWII.

The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, operating the media outlet yourself. The problem is this is easily exposed, destroying credibility.

A more effective strategy is to become a source for legitimate media such that your (dis)information inherits their credibility. Most effective is when one CIA plant is the initial source while a second CIA plant acts seemingly independently as a confirming source. You can push information to the mainstream media, who can then “independently” confirm it, sometimes unknowingly, through your secondary agents. You can basically write tomorrow’s headlines.

Other techniques include exclusive true information mixed with disinformation to establish credibility, using official sources like embassy spokesmen “inadvertently” confirm sub details, and covert funding of research and side gigs to promote academics and experts who can discredit counter-narratives.

From the end of WWII to the Church Committee in 1976, this was all dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Of course the U.S. would not use the CIA to influence elections, especially in fellow democracies. Except it did. Real-time reporting on intelligence is by nature based on limited information, albeit marked with the unambiguous fingerprints of established tradecraft. Always give time a chance to explain.

Through Operation Mockingbird the CIA ran over 400 American journalists as direct assets. Almost none have ever discussed their work publicly. Journalists performed these tasks for the CIA with the consent of America’s leading news organizations. The New York Times alone willingly provided cover for ten CIA officers over decades and kept quiet about it.

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